As time permits over the course the next several days / weeks, explore the Urbana Student Missions Conference2018 General Session Videos. When you do such, do not miss the thread of the exposition of the Book of Revelation and John Inazu’s challenge to Compassionate Confidence.

While we should enjoy God’s good creation, and while we should make the most of our time here, this is not our final destination. The new heavens and the new earth are our destination, where we will live with God forever in face-to-face and heart-to-heart encounter with God through Jesus in the Spirit. Jesus’ first followers’ hopes were set fully and firmly on his promises of enduring presence in their lives through the Spirit, and then later in face-to-face encounter with Jesus in the Father’s house. Certainly, the security of Jesus’ presence in this world and the next would give them hope and assurance in the face opposition and persecution. . . . Jesus’ presence and promises, including the promise that they would live with him in the Father’s house, meant the world to Thomas and Philip and the rest of the disciples. And Jesus’ presence and these promises should mean the world to us today. — Paul Louis Metzger, The Gospel of John: When Love Comes to Town (Intervarsity Press, 2010), 180.

Last week, when I finished the Netflix version of A Series of Unfortunate Events with my two younger daughters, I was struck by the importance of story / perspective in framing the good, the bad, and the ugly. The next day, when I turned to preparations of a small group Bible study on John 14, I found the passage / section of Scripture shouting out the importance of story / perspective in framing the good, the bad, and the ugly. In response I am developing a dialogue between A Series of Unfortunate Events and Jesus’ final teaching to the disciples (John 13-17) for Lent (March 6 – April 18). Stay tuned.

In the meantime . . .

in what manner do your head, heart, and hands witness to the new heavens and new earth as your final destination?

in whom / what do you place your hopes as you engage “the good, the bad, and the ugly” in the daily grind, relationships, and the big picture?

I pray that Jesus’ presence and promises “mean the world” to you, me, and the people of God in our place of study / work / life throughout all our days no matter the challenges faced.

Last year I discovered Sue Burke’s Semiosis at the library and found it an intriguing read. Human colonists arrive on a new planet and over the course of several generations develop a mutually beneficial relationship with the intelligent creatures native to that world. All of the usual first contact challenges apply. How do you communicate without a shared language? How do you establish trust when your very presence could be seen as invasive and hostile? How do you navigate cultural differences? In Semiosis, all of those issue and more must be negotiated across an additional barrier: the locals communicate by smells and chemical signals rather than sight and sound. On this planet, the most intelligent organisms are plants.

As you might imagine, it takes many years for the colonists to even realize the plants are their cognitive peers, let alone attempt a dialogue. While we don’t have evidence of comparable plant intelligence here on Earth, we may still have underestimated our local flora and overlooked their capacity to communicate. Recent research—still being reviewed, but already reported on by The Atlantic—explored whether flowers can hear and possibly even make meaningful sounds. The idea that plants can detect and respond to sound is not entirely new, but despite the classic grade school science fair project of playing Puccini for petunias the musical hypotheses have not been studied more rigorously. This study found that certain flowers respond specifically to the sound of bees and other potential pollinators by sweetening their nectar to make it more attractive. The response is rapid, on the order of just a couple of minutes, a quality you may not regularly associate with plants. From there, one can easily construct a narrative about plants conserving resources like sugar and only spending them when they will be most effective–a kind of targeted marketing, if you will.

The companion study by the same lab listened to tomato and tobacco plants. They detected sounds, but it is less clear if the plants or any other organisms can and do use the sounds for communication. Instead, it could just be noise, like the grumble of your stomach or the cracking of your joints. But even if plants aren’t audibly chatty, they also aren’t just passive listeners. They do actively communicate via chemicals, as The Atlantic story mentions. Actually, many of the mechanisms discussed there also feature in Semiosis, possibly enhanced or extrapolated but clearly based on the science of terrestrial plants.

Not only are plants chatty, they have preferences about who they communicate with. They have a sense of family and prefer to be next to and interact with relatives. That study reports related plants can actually be placed closer together and are more productive, which has practical implications for agriculture. After all, people are going to be living closer together too and needing more food, so growing it more efficiently is and will be important.

I was intrigued by both the novel and the science its based on because it pushes our expectations and assumptions about communication and language. How do you interpret a message you don’t even recognize as a message? How do you have a meaningful relationship with a being whose experience is profoundly different than yours, mediated by different senses? Knowing how much communication is going on under our noses here on Earth makes me wonder if we’ll ever be able to recognize if aliens are trying to talk to us, and also how much other communication we are missing.

If you haven’t seen it yet, please check out this post with news about ESN and Tom Grosh. Tom has been a friend for my entire adult life. He is unequivocally the reason I write for this blog, both because he has been a sustaining force behind ESN for many years and because he invited me to give it a try. I am grateful for the community that has grown here during his tenure, appreciative of the opportunity to develop as a writer, and excited to see what the future holds for Tom and for ESN.

Photo: At Urbana 18, we held a staff party to celebrate Tom’s great work with ESN (Emerging Scholars Network). This picture shows Tom and Theresa Grosh, their daughter Ellen, and InterVarsity Grad/Faculty Ministry Colleagues Bobby Gross (Vice President for GFM), Kathy Tuan-Maclean (Director of Faculty Ministry), and Hannah Eagleson (ESN).

With both sorrow and joy, we announce that Tom Grosh IV will be transitioning to a new role as an area director with CMDA (Christian Medical and Dental Association) in South Central Pennsylvania, and I will be carrying on the vision and mission of ESN. Sorrow, because Tom is an amazing colleague who has grown ESN into a vibrant ministry with a strong model, and I will miss him immensely. Joy, because Tom is moving on to another wonderful opportunity to serve Christ and still plans to do some volunteer writing with ESN, and joy also because I am deeply excited to grow the vision, mission, and model Tom has built at ESN.

Before I say more about ESN’s plans for the new year, I’d like to tell a little more of my story with ESN. My first significant encounter ESN was as a graduate student experiencing something of a crisis. I was starting to realize that I had no idea how to write a dissertation, which was a difficult realization to come to as a PhD student in English literature. Providentially, at that time I met Tom, who was organizing ESN events in south central Pennsylvania and would in time become Associate Director of ESN. He introduced me to local events that provided the community of Christian scholars I was longing for, and he helped me discover my public voice and support other scholars through writing for the ESN blog. In 2014, I joined ESN staff as editor for the Scholar’s Compass devotional project, and then gradually took on more responsibility, including grant writing and organizing ESN programs at the Urbana Student Missions Conference and the American Scientific Affiliation annual faith/science conference.

One reason I’m so passionate about expanding the work of ESN is that my own story is an example of what ESN does. Beyond that, Tom Grosh created a model at ESN that makes it possible for ESN to do something similar for others at a very large scale. As Tom moves to a different area of ministry, here’s how I see the vision, mission, and model he grew at ESN.

ESN Vision

Imagine a world where: Every Christian with an advanced degree is energized throughout their careers to think, teach, and engage missionally for the common good with the university, the church, and the world.

ESN Mission

We build: Pathways and resources for Christian academics everywhere to find the relationships, ideas, and public voice they need in the early decades of their careers to fulfill Christ’s calling for them in the world.

ESN Model

We’re building: a digital first network serving Christian scholars across the 20-year arc of their early career, wherever they go geographically.

That’s how I see the ministry Tom has so faithfully grown over the past 6 years, and I’m incredibly excited to continue building it in that direction. This spring we’ll especially focus on building the core of prayer supporters and financial collaborators we need to help ESN grow through this transition and serve our expanding community over time.

As in any transition, there will be some adjustments. We will continue regularly featuring the voices of thoughtful Christian scholars at our blog and providing a hub for Christian academics on social media, but our publication pace will be a bit more leisurely in the Spring 2019 semester, closer to 1-3 posts a week rather than 3-5. We anticipate this will give us the time we need to broaden and strengthen our support team, while also promoting the Christian Scholars Grant and collaborating with American Scientific Affiliation to provide student/early career programming at their summer faith/science conference.

It’s a truly exciting moment to work with ESN: More and more Christians in the university are growing their community, their ideas, and their public voice through what God is doing in ESN. I’m honored and joyful to be serving ESN as we start 2019.

Will you join our team?

We’re so grateful to God for growing Emerging Scholars Network, and to you for being part of our community! We’re creating a team of people to help ESN grow and thrive during this transitional year. If you would like to support ESN during this transitional moment, you can sign up for our 2019 Transition Prayer Team here and/or become a financial collaborator with our ministry here. If you would like to talk more with us during this transition, you can contact us here.

“It was amazing seeing so many Christian graduate students passionate about integrating their faith and their academic work. The connections were invaluable and further spurred me on to persevere as a faithful witness to Jesus’ kingdom in the academy.” — InterVarsity ESN Urbana 18 Fellow

One of my [Hannah] most vivid memories of Urbana 15: sitting at a table of emerging scholars passionately discussing what it means to be missional in a humanities field, while the loudspeaker above blared regular announcements such as, “Those in the green area, you should be finishing your salad now. Those in the red area, you should start clearing your tables now.” I thought back to that moment this year as ESN welcomed the 2018 ESN Urbana Fellows, 30 Christian scholars participating in a program that grew partly out of that moment. I’m excited to tell you more about what God did through ESN’s Urbana presence in 2018, but first let me tell you a little more about that seminal moment at Urbana 15.

At Urbana 15, I helped Tom Grosh IV and ESN launch a pilot program where we connected with about 30 emerging scholars and provided small group support in contextualizing Urbana’s call to missions for those in or considering grad school. We had videochats for the small groups before and after Urbana, and at Urbana we arranged for each small group to have dinner with a mentor in their broad subject area (natural sciences, social sciences, or humanities).

For those who haven’t been, the Urbana dinner team is amazing: in 2015 they fed 16,000 people every night and got it done in time for the evening plenary. Even as I marvelled at their efficiency and dedication, though, I wondered how our humanities conversation was going to go. The setting was a far cry from the average humanities seminar. To my joy and amazement, the students in the group and the mentor professor we had recruited to chat with them forged a deep and genuine connection on the spot. The mentor professor talked about the challenges and opportunities of welcoming others to consider Christ in one of the most atheistic cities in the US, where she lives and works.

The students responded by pouring out their own stories: how an encounter with a fellow student complaining about Christianity spurred a study of apologetics and then wider philosophy and theology, how meeting caring Christian students led to one participant’s coming to Christ and then living as a visible Christian in her graduate humanities program, and more. When “the voice in the sky,” (what the Urbana hospitality team calls the loudspeaker announcements) suggested that our table finish up, the emerging scholars eagerly found another place outside the dining hall to continue the conversation. I realized that even as someone who had deeply longed for Christian community in my own graduate program, and even as someone who worked for ESN, I had underestimated how excited these emerging scholars were to connect with other believers working in similar contexts.

That dinner conversation really stuck with me, and it’s one of the things that encouraged us to build on that pilot program to provide the ESN Urbana 18 Fellows Program this year. We recruited emerging scholars in four broad field areas (humanities; social sciences; math and natural science; and social science), then supported them through an advance videochat and a dinner at Urbana to help contextualize what it means to be missional in higher education and related professional fields. We are deeply appreciative of the financial sponsorship we received from Park Street Church Missions (Boston, MA), and from our frequent collaborator the American Scientific Affiliation. They truly made this program possible, and we are deeply thankful. This time, we were able to host dinner in the ESN/GFM Lounge at Urbana. For a taste of what this program meant to emerging scholars, we invite you to browse the quotes below and enjoy the pictures in this post. Thank you to all of you who support us through prayer or financial collaboration—you too made this program possible, and your generosity is making a huge difference for emerging scholars as they follow Christ and work for the common good.

We hope all of you can join us at an ESN event soon!

God bless,

Hannah Eagleson

Tom Grosh IV

InterVarsity’s Emerging Scholars Network

More Quotes from ESN Urbana 18 Fellows:

The ESN Fellows Program introduced me to other faithful witnesses in the unique position of being a professing Christian in science. The experience of connecting with academics as well as simply seeing the number of people who are sharing in my struggles was a great encouragement.

The ESN fellows program at Urbana helped me in many ways. First, it encouraged me to come to Urbana; second, it helped me meet people; third, it contributed to translating the message of Urbana to a practical and relevant vision for myself.

Meeting with fellow Christians in academia and learning about how to be missional in our context was very inspiring. I am bringing what I learned at Urbana home to share with other Christian grad students on my campus.

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” – 2 Corinthians 12:9

Living in relationships with immigrants, refugees, and other low-income people has forced us to grapple with the question of what it means for us, as followers of Christ, to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. It has also awakened us to the ethically complex questions of immigration and refugee policy—who do we let in, what do we do with those who came in even though our government did not allow them in, and what effect will our policies have on those already here and struggling to get by? Of course, our attempts to address these questions have been shaped by our own personal journeys. — Soerens and Yang (2018), “The Immigration Dilemma” in Welcoming the Stranger, p. 9.

We have argued that Scripture makes repeated and clear calls for us to take special concern for the stranger, to love them as ourselves, and to welcome them as if serving Jesus himself. God commands us to obey, which is primary if we are to truly follow Christ. ‘There is no other road to faith or discipleship,’ Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, except ‘obedience to the call of Jesus.’ We dare not dismiss God’s instructions to us, but rather should move from reflection to prayerful action. Serving and loving immigrants can take on different expressions, and each are vitally important in the broader Christian witness. — p. 203.

What is my main takeaway for those of us in the context of higher ed? Royce’s conclusion summarizes the book’s call to prayer, knowing and learning from immigrant neighbors, serving, giving, educating our churches and communities/advocacy, and addressing the root issues. My prayer / passion for us as Emerging Scholars is to embrace such a way of life, birthed by loving God and neighbor (second in priority to God) with head, heart, and hands. If you haven’t picked up Welcoming the Stranger, I encourage you to do such and journey through Royce’s series individually or with a small group.

I came across a couple of neat videos of emergent behavior that I thought might be interesting to discuss together. The first comes from a study of marathons and the dynamics of how the race starts. Typically marathons have large fields such that everyone cannot start running at once; the runners at the front begin, and the “start” moves backwards through the field in a sort of wave. If you’ve never run a marathon, you might be familiar with similar phenomena from other contexts, such as traffic on a freeway. I’ve encountered traffic situations where all the cars are basically stopped, then it seems like things open up and you can move forward for a bit, then everyone comes to a stop again, and so on for a few iterations without any discernible cause for the starting and stopping. If you had a bird’s-eye view, you might be able to understand this traffic pattern as waves of movement traveling backwards from the accident or roadwork creating the congestion. You can see that wave in the marathon videos below (and notice the bridges of the Pittsburgh marathon at the beginning).

The second is not quite as relatable, but I think still worth giving a watch. It shows the collective behavior of the worm Lumbriculus variegatus and how they glom together to maintain temperature and keep from drying out. And they don’t just huddle together; they can move together and their blob can exhibit a range of behaviors and properties depending on the circumstances.

In case you’re not familiar, “emergent behavior” is the name given to phenomena that are the product of many individuals interacting without group-level coordination. In other words, the wave in the runner crowd and the blob of worms are features of the group, but nobody is in charge of the group. Instead, the actions of the individuals without awareness of the group are sufficient to produce the overall behavior. That’s not to say what’s happening at the group level isn’t real. There is clearly a wave and there is clearly a blob, and it is meaningful to talk about them. Just because we can see how the runners or the worms interact to create the wave or the blob, doesn’t mean we have to conclude there is nothing but runners or worms.

I was thinking about these emergent behaviors when I read the following quote from Timothy Keller on Twitter.

If you are being swept up in joy and wonder by a work of art, it will impoverish you to remind yourself that this feeling is simply a chemical reaction that helped your ancestors find food and escape predators, and nothing more.

It’s a quote from his book Making Sense of God that another user shared and Keller retweeted. The context is a passage about how we can have powerful emotional reactions to music, and that a purely materialist understanding of that experience is lacking; our joy and wonder are best understood if there is a God, or perhaps at least a spiritual realm to which music and other art points us. Now, I definitely share Keller’s belief in God. And I agree that talking about emotions as nothing more than chemical reactions is missing something. At the same time, I think understanding the chemical and physiological reactions that generate emotions can enrich rather than impoverish my relationship to music and art. And that’s a sense I don’t get, at least from this passage of Keller’s book. Instead, it seems like one must choose between the emotional/spiritual/transcendent description and the chemical/physiological/evolutionary one.

“If you are being swept up in joy and wonder by a work of art, it will impoverish you to remind yourself that this feeling is simply a chemical reaction that helped your ancestors find food and escape predators, and nothing more.”@timkellernycpic.twitter.com/V2dxia8LfB

Sure, I get why some people prefer to focus on the emotional/spiritual/transcendent level; that’s the one that comes most naturally to us. I think it’s a similar reason why some people don’t want to watch the special features and find out how the movie is made. They don’t want to know about the math involved in rendering spectacular vistas, or the sweat behind the stunts of a stunning action sequence, or the way that editing can shape a narrative from pieces that don’t tell any story on their own. That’s fair; I don’t want to hinder anyone’s experience of art. But I love to know how all of those moviemaking elements work and how they come together. And I love knowing more about how my body generates its responses to those movies, or how people come together to create waves of activity, or even how worms come together to make sophisticated blobs. And for other folks like me, I’d hate for them to miss out on the possibility of believing in God because they are also interested in those things as well. I imagine Keller feels the same way, based on the overall tenor of his writing and teaching. But in case it wasn’t clear from that particular quote, I thought it was worth elaborating on.

How do you approach art & science? Do you prefer to maintain some distance and appreciate the big picture, dig into the details of how it works and how it came to be, or some of both?

At Emerging Scholars Network, we love to crowdsource ideas for following Christ faithfully and serving others well in the academic life. In the 2018/2019 academic year, we’ve been sharing brief insights on how to grow spiritually in the academic life. Read the series to date here. For more of Jamie Noyd’s thoughtful writing for ESN, click here.

Thus says the Lord: “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls. – Jeremiah 6:26

What might it mean to see the campus as a crossroads? As a place of intersection where the church and academia meet? Over the past year I have spent time walking across the University of Cincinnati at least once a week, praying that my eyes would be open to see this place as God does. Some days the prayers come naturally, while during others it seems like I’m just repeating what I said last week. Either way, the discipline of being present on campus and looking has slowly been changing my own heart and helping me to recognize the presence of God’s kingdom in this place. It has also been challenging me to step into this crossroads more fully.

As you take time to walk on campus look at the buildings – old and new – and pray for the work going on in them. Look at posters of upcoming lectures and events. Are you drawn to attend any of them? How can you pray for them? Ask for compassion for the students, faculty, and staff walking past – and pray that they may be blessed. Ask God to show you the good way to live out the good news on campus and the courage to walk in it.

I took too long to fall in love with you, beauty so ancient and so new. I took too long to fall in love with you! But there you were, inside, and I was outside—and there I searched for you, and into those shapely things you made, my misshapen self went sliding. You were with me, but I wasn’t with you. Those things, which wouldn’t exist unless they existed in you, held me back, far from you. You called and shouted and shattered my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you put my blindness to flight. You smelled sweet, and I drew breath, and now I pant for you. I tasted you, and now I’m starving and parched; you touched me, and I burst into flame with a desire for your peace. — Augustine, Confessions[2]

The format of this series will be a quote (see above), a short response (the text you’re currently reading), and a recommendation regarding next steps (continue reading). I pray that these posts will encourage:

reflection as we seek to rest in God (our true love),

faithful witness as followers of Christ, and

prayerful consideration of the resources available to us as we missionally engage our vocational context.

Please feel free to share in the comment section a quote / reflection / challenge from a book that you are reading (individually and / or as part of the book discussion). If you desire to write a post for the Emerging Scholars Network on a book that you are currently exploring, please drop ESN a line. Thank-you!